Autumn has begun (at least in the northern
hemisphere). I trust you're all welcoming fall in
appropriately celebratory ways, getting warm sweaters out of
closets and checking the schedule for football, deer hunting,
or mid-term exams. And I hope you enjoy this small bouquet of
musings.

The last
issue of Scholegium argued that we do not leave history behind
but rather we add layers to it, just as a growing tree does
not leave behind it's earlier growth but adds new outer
layers, accumulating a greater bulk and solidity. The past,
all of it, is our life; it's our foundation and what gives
meaning and solidity to the present. To dismiss the past as
irrelevant is like wanting to keep the branches of a tree
hanging in mid-air and growing while chopping away the trunk.
It's absurd.

But let's
think a little furtherabout
this. We moderns tend to think that the present alone is
important and the past irrelevant; and it's not surprising
that we think that way because we are exceedingly arrogant
creatures who believe that if we live in this age it must
therefore be important. But in fact it is the other way
around. History -- the STORY -- is all there is and all that
is important, and the present is just the very tiny,
relatively insignificant outer edge, one more onion-thin layer
increasing the massive edifice that we call history. Our time
is one more chapter added to the growing book. Our own present
significance we will never know; only those who come after us
will be able to judge about us. It's only when you turn the
last page of a book that you can assess it; it's only when the
credits roll and the music swells importantly and the people
get up and stumble up the aisles over the popcorn buckets at
the end of the movie that you can evaluate the movie fairly;
it's only when Croesus dies that Solon can say anything about
the happiness of his life as a whole. Count no man happy till
he dies, free of pain at last, says the Chorus at the end of
Oedipus the King. Likewise, we in the present are utterly
unqualified to judge of the importance of our own age and all
its works. The age is not over yet, not enough time has
passed; we're too close to the detail and far too emotionally
involved.

But we
can study the past far more dispassionately and with far more
help. Unlike the present, the past is fixed and stable.
Whether our view of it is equally stable is another question,
but the past is done changing. And the past has context -- not
only did the fourteenth century happen, but so did the
fifteenth, and so the fourteenth century has context because
it has a before (the thirteenth) and an after (the fifteenth).
It's the middle of something to which there is also a
beginning and an end. We, on the other hand, have a before but
we have no after... yet. We're the middle of something to
which there is beginning but no end that we'll ever see. So we
don't have enough context to study ourselves well -- but the
past does.

Of course
this way of viewing history and the present is flawed, because
all ways of seeing things with our finite biased perspective
are flawed. Our knowledge of anything in the past is
continually changing as new information comes to light and new
theories better account for the epicycles and we become more
aware of our own ignorance. But to say that this view is
flawed is not to say that it's wrong. To begin with, God
Himself expects us to study and learn from and remember the
past. It's precisely the failure to do this that God warned
His people against in the Old Testament, and that brought them
so much misery when they didn't listen, and that the Church is
warned against all over again in the New Testament. "These
things were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of
the ages have come."

And to
see history this way -- to see it as more knowable, and
therefore more usefully studied for wisdom than the present in
the thick of which we are so deeply mired -- is to begin to
have just exactly that wisdom that we need in order to get
through the mire of the present. We don't ignore the present
-- but we can't do anything about it till we've learned to
live in the past.

_____________________________________________

DE ASTRIS -- The
Equinox

Autumn officially began in the northern
hemisphere yesterday (Saturday, September 22, 2012) in the
morning, and from now on until late March the nights will be
longer than the days, with the longest night and shortest day
coming on the Winter Solstice just before Christmas. Day and
night are roughly equal in length right now, with sunrise
coming around six in the morning and sunset around six in the
evening - or it would, that is, were it not for Daylight
Savings Time. Subtract an hour from the time on your watch at
sunrise or sunset and you'll see. It's not true that you can
balance an egg on its end during the equinox but there are
other fun things you can do: sometime in the next day or two
mark, if you can, the spot on the horizon where the sun rises
and sets. Next spring at the vernal (spring) equinox the sun
will be back at exactly those spots. Night becomes more
important during the next six months since we spend so much of
our time in it. Imagine what life in the dark six months of
the year was like before electric lights - how much more sleep
would you have gotten! For a pleasant and thought-provoking
read during the coming long evenings, pick up A. Roger
Ekirch's At Day's Close: Night in Times Past.